What is the Meaning of the Recent Eclipse?

It is not often that we have a truly one-of-a-kind experience in our life that we can be certain will never be repeated. I’ve just come back from Salem, Oregon (which was in the path of totality) to watch the recent solar eclipse. Feeling like an art-happening created by Nature herself, words fail me in describing how truly mind-blowing it was. It felt like some sort of numinous religious experience that I will never forget for the rest of my life…[read more]

Interview with Paul on Gaia Television

What Would C.G. Jung Say about Donald Trump

The great doctor of the soul and modern day alchemist C. G.Jung was so far ahead of his time that, more than half a century after his death, he is still barely appreciated. Jung was a genius who had incredibly deep insight into the nature of the psyche, particularly how it informs and gives shape to what plays out in our world. I find myself wondering, what would Jung say about the madness currently playing out in our world if he were alive today? I can only imagine. Jung was of the opinion that “Active Imagination,” a process in which we actively dialogue and have it out with the figures of our unconscious, was the most powerful practice he had ever come across for working with—and integrating—the unconscious. I find myself wondering, what if I were to do active imagination with Jung himself?…[more]

Book Release for Awakened by Darkness

(Filmed at Powell’s City of Books - Portland, OR - Monday, January 18)

Rebirth in an Age of Polarization

At the present moment our country—and our world—are insanely polarized. If humanity is seen as a single macro-organism, it is as if there is a primordial dissociation—a split—deep within its very source. Our species is suffering from what the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung calls a “sickness of dissociation,” which is a state of fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious itself that has seemingly spilled outside of our skulls and has taken the form of collective events playing themselves out en masse on the world stage. Jung writes, “And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness.” And yet, everything in our world has at least two sides, which is to say that our sickness of dissociation is not solely pathological. To quote Jung, “the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation … is simultaneously an age of rebirth”…[more]

Illuminating Dark Times

We are truly living in dark times. More accurately, we are living in times where the darkness is emerging from hiding in the shadows and is becoming visible. It is easy and very seductive to become overwhelmed with pessimism, despair and depression during these times of darkness, which would sadly be to unwittingly feed and collude with the darkness. And yet, to quote a popular saying on the French left, “the hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times”… [more]

Healing Our Collective Sickness

Drawing by Paul Levy

In these uncertain, crazy, polarizing and scary times we live in, one thing I think everyone can agree on is this: if viewed as a single macro-organism, humanity has fallen ill. With the ascension of Donald Trump onto the highest throne of political power on planet earth, some of us might feel that the sickness is finally going to be called out, illumined and healed, while others feel that Trump and his administration are themselves the current purveyors, lineage holders and embodiments of the sickness. Either way, the fact that humanity is not well—afflicted with some sort of disorder—is something that I think we can all agree upon; this might be a good starting point for our inquiry. The obvious question: What is the nature of this deeper sickness that is pulsing through the veins of humanity? In contemplating this very question, philosopher John McMurtry, author of the brilliant book The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, refers to the “Great Sickness” that pervades our modern day capitalist system as having all of the hallmark qualities of cancer. Using a whole systems approach, he is pointing out that the diagnosis of cancer precisely maps onto a macro-analysis of our current body politic, which is to say that what is happening collectively in our world can be recognized to be a form of cancer.

Are We Humans Terminally Insane or Just Waking Up?

How does anyone possibly express in words the state of collective madness that humanity has fallen into at this time in our history? As if in a hypnotic trance, our species is enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale, rushing as fast as we can towards our own self-destruction. We are destroying the biospheric life-support systems of the planet in so many different ways that it is as if we are determined to make this suicide attempt work—using a variety of methods as a perverse insurance policy, in case a couple of them don’t do the job. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all.” In trying to find a way to write about this state of affairs, I find myself going “off-planet,” imagining what it would look like if some enlightened aliens, in their travels throughout the universe, came upon our planet. Observing from a distance, they would naturally see all the various living beings who call planet earth home as related members of one larger organism—a single eco-system—who literally depend upon each other for survival. From this vantage point, I imagine, they would be utterly baffled at why human beings—the seemingly most intelligent species ever to appear on planet earth—are acting out their destructive impulses practically without restraint in every corner of the globe. Contemplating the state of humanity, I imagine these awakened beings wondering, “What in the world has gotten into them?”…[more]

Quantum Rainbows

The appearance of a rainbow is made up of the interaction of raindrops, sunlight and our consciousness. By itself—from its own side—a rainbow has no existence in our universe prior to being observed. This is to say that there is no intrinsic, independent, objective rainbow that exists separate from the observing consciousness. Being a function of our observation, if no one were there observing it, there would be no rainbow. There is no physical rainbow existing somewhere out there in space; the rainbow is only to be found within—and not separate from—the very mind that is observing it. The highest Buddhist teachings—and now quantum physics—says that our physical universe is similar in this regard to a rainbow…[more]

History in the Making at Standing Rock

Every now and then an event happens in our world that captures my imagination, touching something really deep within me. The Native American protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock, North Dakota is just such an event. This has the feeling of a truly seminal, historic event in which we are all invited to participate. The peaceful protests by what are known as the “water protectors” against a multi-billion dollar corporation putting an oil pipeline through what the Native Americans consider sacred land, endangering the source of their water—i.e., of life itself—is a deeply symbolic event with real life consequences. In a very real sense, the protest is itself a sacred ceremony being performed on the world stage, being done on behalf of all of humanity – which is to say, all of us…[more]

Lucid-Dreaming Quantum Physics

When quantum physics was first formulated in the early part of the twentieth century, it was during a time of great collective asleep-ness. Quantum physics’ creation/discovery can be seen as an inkling of a burgeoning awakening in the collective unconscious, expressed through the realm of science. The process that quantum physics is articulating regarding how an observer/participant evokes (i.e., “dreams up”) reality is generally unfolding unconsciously in most humans, which is to say most of us in the waking dream of life are dreaming non-lucidly. A question that naturally arises is what would happen as more of us become increasingly aware of the world-shaping creative power that we are wielding, which is to say how would things change as we wake up to our powers of quantum creation? How would an amplification of our awareness of our powers of quantum creation affect these very powers as we are more and more consciously using them? Like quantum physics reflects back to us, oftentimes asking the right question is more important than finding the right answer…[more]

The Enlightened Madness of Philip K. Dick: The Black Iron Prison and Wetiko

Recently, I have been delighted to learn that the science fiction author Philip K. Dick (henceforth PKD) was, in his own completely unique and “Philip K. Dickian” way describing wetiko—the psycho-spiritual disease that afflicts our species—to a T. Considered to be one of the pre-eminent sci-fi writers of his—or any—time, PKD had one of the most unique, creative, unusual and original minds I have ever come across. Way ahead of his time, he was a true visionary and seer, possibly even a prophet. To say that PKD had an unfettered imagination is an understatement of epic proportions—it is hard to imagine an imagination more unrestrained. Continually questioning everything, he was actually a very subtle thinker whose prime concern was the question “What is reality?” Though mainly a writer of fiction, PKD didn’t consider himself a novelist, but rather, a “fictionalizing philosopher,” by which he meant that his stories—what have been called “his wacky cauldron of science fiction and metaphysics”—were employed as the medium for him to formulate his perceptions. In other words, his fiction was the way he was trying to figure out what was going on in this crazy world of ours, as well as within his own mind. As the boundary dissolved between what was real and what wasn’t, he even wondered whether he had become a character in one of his own novels (in his own words, “I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books”). Through his writing, PKD tapped into the shamanic powers of language to shape, bend and alter consciousness, thereby changing our view and experience of reality itself…[more]

Writing Magic

When we recognize that we live in a magic-filled universe, we realize that we don’t have to create magic, but rather, simply allow the intrinsic magic of the universe to reveal itself. If this is indeed the case, let’s do an experiment, and see if in the joint co-operative venture of writing (my job) and reading (your job) this article, we can indeed let the inherent magic of the universe shine through our shared endeavor. In my career as a writer I have learned that when an article I am working on is birthing itself into form, at a certain point the universe itself always seems to step in and “conspire” (which literally means “to breathe together”) with the article, infusing it with an energy that I am not able to supply by my lonesome self…[more]

When the Most Awake Among Us Fall Asleep:

Marc Gafni, His Supporters and Wetiko

In early 2016 a controversy swirling around a charismatic spiritual teacher with a long history of abuse allegations grabbed my attention due to its over-the-top craziness. The more deeply I investigated the situation the more my mind was blown. The teacher’s name is Marc Gafni and he has attracted a remarkable number of renowned leaders defending him as well as many major figures condemning him. A recent spate of publicity, including a 2015 Christmas day article in the New York Times, has brought this situation, to evoke the Academy Award winning movie, into the “spotlight” … [more]

The Mind Parasites of Colin Wilson:

Fiction or Reality?

It should get our attention that every person or group of people that have discovered what the Native American people called wetiko unanimously consider it to be the most important topic—there’s not even any competition—to understand in our world today. In addition to independent researchers like myself, many artists have also been creatively and imaginatively expressing the insidious workings of wetiko psychosis in a wide variety of mediums. Oftentimes creative artists are the canaries in the coal-mine of humanity’s psyche, presciently giving communicable form to what is emerging within the collective unconscious of our species. To use one example: Colin Wilson, in “the supernatural metaphysical cult thriller” The Mind Parasites, first published in 1967, is using the fictive power of the literary imagination to give living form to this virus of the mind. I am so accustomed to writing about wetiko “non-fictionally,” that the idea of approaching it through the made-up medium of fiction, i.e., through creative art that isn’t as “serious” as nonfiction, opens up new orders of freedom within my soul. Wetiko can be likened to a “bug” that hampers the creative imagination—potentially even “killing” it, if it’s even possible to talk in such fatalistic terms about imagination—which is to say that it makes sense to use the creative imagination as a way of dealing with its imagination-killing effects…. [more]

Paul on On the Block Radio

On February 24th, Paul was interviewed by Andrew Gurevich for On the Block Radio. To visit the On the Block page for this interview with Paul: click here. To listen to the interview at SoundCloud: click here.

Quantum Meta-Physics

The discoveries of quantum physics throw physicists back upon themselves. To quote physicist Freeman Dyson, “My message is that science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it.” Quantum physics’ realizations about the nature of elementary particles are a magic mirror reflecting something back to us not just about nature, but about our nature. It is in this sense that quantum physics becomes indistinguishable from a form of metaphysics. To quote Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, “I consider science an integrating part of our endeavor to answer the one great philosophical question which embraces all others, the one that Plotinus expressed by his brief: who are we? And more than that: I consider this not only one of the tasks, but the task, of science, the only one that really counts.” … [more]

Interview: On the Road to the Olympia Sync Summit

Quantum Physics: The Physics of Dreaming

For the last few months, all I’ve wanted to do is to read about quantum physics. I’ve been studying quantum physics off and on for decades, but have never gone as far down the rabbit hole as I have this time. It feels like I’ve gone through the looking glass to the point of no return. The more I contemplate what quantum physics is telling us, the more my mind gets blown into phantasmal traces of nonexistent subatomic particles. Studying quantum theory is like ingesting a mind-altering, time-release psychedelic. Taking in what quantum physics is revealing to us about the universe we inhabit is “psycho-activating” beyond belief, in that it activates the psyche, inspires the imagination and synchronistically dissolves the boundary between mind and matter. To say that quantum physics is the greatest scientific discovery of all time is not an exaggeration; its profound revelations and implications cannot be overstated. In discovering the quantum, physics has indisputably encountered consciousness, there is simply no avoiding this fact. Quantum theory demands a radical re-visioning of the role that consciousness plays in the unfolding of reality. Quantum physics is pointing out, in unequivocal terms, that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness are inseparably linked, and that ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other…[more]

2 Responses to What is the Meaning of the Recent Eclipse?

Wow I am very shocked at how well you are balancing your ying-yang Paul! And and admire your courage and fearlessness. I am a black hole right now.. And any and all information you give is helping me tremendously!!!

I have been on the mission of destroying evil for a very long time. And I really appreciate how you can accept both sides. I realize I have been hurting myself when I take it upon myself to try and conquer evil. It is far too powerful and strong to defeat obviously.

I really like the way you describe to appreciate darkness and evil also. Where as I spend far too much time worrying if I am fighting for good or evil. Which means I just need to stop fighting in general or wars will keep coming my way. I hope one day I can balance myself, so the wars end.